For the last several years, teacher-researchers Jessica Jasper, Laura Dvorak, Steven Athanases, and Sergio Sanchez have partnered with a program called Globe Education, Shakespeare's Globe London. Practitioners in the program use teaching practices that engage learners with Shakespeare's works and other complex texts through drama practices. Jess…

Spoken word is a performative poetry that combines "words, sounds, and movements that privilege a Black aesthetic" (Winn 60). It has roots in blues, spiritual, and hip-hop music and has been popularized in particular by the slam performances exemplified in the documentary "Louder Than a Bomb." Due to its performative nature,…

Throughout a unit of study about survival, students and their teacher engaged in individualized learning. Discussions of teacher-dictated curriculum versus student-driven learning, design of the unit, and students' and teacher's experiences and takeaways from the unit are included.

In this article, the authors discuss how teachers can help students to grieve through the power of writing. Six years ago, a student named Miranda, experienced a great loss. To make sense of the tragedy, Miranda did what came naturally to her; she picked up her pen to write in her journal. Now a college sophomore, Miranda has grown through the…

Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is based on the premise that: (1) students can learn to use the reading strategies that more skillful readers use automatically; (2) students can engage in high-quality discussions about text with peers in heterogeneous student-led groups; and (3) structures and supports can act as a vehicle for equitable…

Located in the suburbs of a large midwestern city, Trail Middle School serves a predominantly middle-class population. The data the authors feature in this article include group discussions and interviews with students, as well as recordings of in-class lessons, student work, and fieldnotes. The authors focus on the theme of gender as it emerged…

This article explores three ways a teacher incorporated text sets into her seventh-grade classroom to foster authentic inquiry. Student reflections suggest this approach helped them cultivate questioning, researching, and cooperative learning skills that became lasting habits of inquiry and helped them succeed on core tests.

Through a case study of a seventh-grade ELA teacher, this article examines New Literacies pedagogy and more specifically a digital video project amid high-stakes testing pressures that often place limitations on teaching and learning.